Biglerville, Pennsylvania TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

This unit focused on developing positive class dynamics through factors such as seating arrangements, groupings and how to develop effective leaning environments as well as the importance of building a good rapport with students and how to do so. It also covered Discipline issues and methods increasing or decreasing the dominance of the teacher as needed. In this unit, I found the explanations of the various impacts of seating and groupings particularly relevant, as they are easily changed factors (unlike the personality of the teacher, etc) that can make large changes to the learning environment. Particularly in the past I have taught in a setting where orderly rows are the norm, and always struggled to get students to participate in such a whole class setting due to a lack of psychological safety. This greatly slowed the explanation and introduction sections of my classes and students often began to disengage at this point, before reengaging when pair work or group work started. The use of a horse shoe, may in part help with this, though still being a whole class setting this may still be a challenge. Similarly, the flaws of group work and seating arrangements are something I often experienced, but rarely thought about. Students often revert to N1 in this setting (more so than in group work I find) and this unit made me realize that one must be a bit more vigilant with this arrangement to keep students on task and using the correct language.